Rs 65 lakh released as transport grant to students

To implement Right to Education, the state government has released Rs 65 lakh as the transportation grant for students living more than a km away from their school. The grant will cover students enrolled in the primary and elementary schools of 12 districts. The Programme Approval Board of the union ministry of human resource and development has sanctioned the grant for 2,167 students.

For every student the amount of Rs 3,000 per annum has been released to the district education officers (elementary) of Amritsar, Bathinda, Faridkot, Fazilka, Ferozepur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Ludhiana, Mansa, Moga, Pathankot and Rupnagar. The department would provide the funds to students with distance of more than 1 km from their school for classes till 5th.

For students enrolled in classes 6th and 8th, students with a distance of 3 km from the school would be provided the facility, said director general school education, Kahan Singh Pannu. “The students were identified from the records sent by the district education officers . Our focus is on schools where strength is low. In the state, 2167 such students have been identified in 12 districts,” said Pannu.

Ludhiana leads the list of such students with 492, Fazilka is second with 402 students, with 378 students Bathinda is at number 3. Amritsar has only three students on the list. “From this grant school heads have been directed to pay Rs 50 per month or actual fair (whichever is minimum) to the student for transportation purposes. The school headmaster will keep the record for expenses made for this purpose,” said the DGSE. “We have released the amount for the whole year to the district. The release will remain effective till March 2013.”

“We want to bring those students to the government school, who normally abstain due to distances and shortage of finance. District education officers have been asked to implement the scheme by ensuring daily attendance of identified students to the school.”